How many illegal objects do you have in your home? I would guess many are either illicit drugs, or digital objects such as pirated films. Here we see where changes in the digital economy have transformed crime. Often people in search of illegal content stream content rather than ‘own’ it so the demand for digital goods of that sort has fallen. Even digital objects lose their permanence.
Cryptomarket participants, law enforcement agencies and security analysts employ several assumptions what drives technical and organisational change and how new techniques and technologies are evaluated by them. These are: law enforcement activity is a major source of disruption; technology is adapted based on its technical qualities; new financial opportunities such as new drugs drive new market actors. In fact, markets are quite resilient to law enforcement takedowns. A major source of disruption is hosting failure, hacking and breakdown of trust between participants. Criminals may rely on older, tried and tested technology even if it presents risks to them. They often seek status opportunities as much as or more than financial ones. Finally, those involved in drug markets often show a strong ideological commitment to the cryptomarkets as a socially beneficial way of obtaining drugs.
Cybercriminals and Law Enforcement Imagine Crime and so Shape What Crime Is
In a world of deep fakes, the evidence chain is more reliant on human trust. Perhaps the blockchain could be agreed on as impermeable social memory, with hashing to preserve secrecy. Law enforcement use parallel construction or parallel evidencing to disguise the real source of information on cybercriminal activity. In the case of Silk Road, the official story much repeated around the world is that a badly configured server was leaking IP information. The reality may have been a full scan of the internet by the National Security Agency. New methodological concepts are needed to keep space with the growing capacities of criminals and states: ransomware can be understood by epidemiology, following vulnerability vectors.
‘Semi-crime’ like captcha-solving by captcha farms can facilitate illicit activities. It uses vast amounts of human labour. Automatic software started to replace captcha farms so then we have tests that are harder for computers to solve which involve categorisation of hills and zebra crossings and so on. Matching this tells us a lot about machine learning as computer scientist teams try and break captcha. Eventually machine learning is good enough to beat new captcha. Now there is a version 3 which is behavioural and involves no direct test.
Social media fraud is a great way of pumping one’s reputation (Paquet-Clouston et al. 2018). They found that clients for SMF services were would-be social media celebrities, actors, shops and others who wanted to inflate their reputation. There are legal ways of achieving the same outcome (using click-farm reputation services) and illegal ones (using botnets). As ever the problem comes when someone pays a service to achieve an outcome without caring too much about the means used, so a starlet’s agent pays a service to fluff her popularity on instagram and that service uses a botnet. Who is enabling and permitting the crime? It’s a chain of demand which creates normal crime. There is not much incentive to any actor in the crime creation chain to actually fight it. Instagram, the actor, the agent, are not threatened by it.
The digital enables both forms of crime and association that do not have direct offline analogues (e.g. swarming, mobbing, automated crime etc.) and that enable meatspace crime in new ways. So there shouldn’t be a binary between the real and the virtual. The real/virtual binary creates several problems: cops, victims and bystanders don’t take cyberattacks as seriously as they would real-world harassment. It is viewed as both ‘not real’ and ‘too terrifying to contemplate’. There are significant features of cybercrime in terms of its cultural performance, transgression and signification. Part of the pleasure of using cryptomarkets is the enjoyment of transgression and performing oneself as a responsible person with agency, in charge of their drug use purchasing and use. Most important, lots of labour goes into making these things work.
A lot of changes that we attribute to the digital happened long before digitalisation. The flattening of drug trafficking chains, much reduced middle market and so on all happened as a result of globalisation not the ability to use digital technology. Sharing knowledge about new drugs happened via Alexander Shulgin’s books and other chemists, it used paper not bits. There are some changes which are made possible through digital systems such as providing reasonably reliably third party mediation, providing more real time intelligence, and new drugs introduced through the cryptomarkets such as nootropics. New drugs and new ways of using them come into being as there is more rapid sharing of knowledge and products. We see how there has to be a strong substrate of shared knowledge, habits and priorities in order for this to happen. Criminal markets are also driving technological change.
Crime Has Logics, not Only Rationality
Illegal markets like any other market would not work if everyone behaved rationally. As in much else it does not really work if we seek to explain human behaviour in terms of calculative rationality. That is not how humans think. We have come to recognise that markets do not work as advertised. The impression of a frictionless, buyer responsive free market in illicit products is illuminating and attractive to but incomplete and in some ways incorrect. Illegal markets are not just black markets that prey on the legal, they are one and the same, central to capital accumulation and resource allocation (Beckert and Dewey 2017).
The second some illegal behaviour is uncovered in an otherwise legal market the first response everyone involved reaches for is that the boundary between legal and illegal was so blurred. Criminals are reasonable, in that they are prepared to give reasons and act according to a logic. It just better be one that you get. Markets exist on shared logics and expectations, shared norms and shared expectations of outcomes, shared procedures and shared commensurability—the assessment of value and whether one has gained or lost value. This is a kind of procedural rationality.
With cryptomarkets, they rapidly became dominated by a very few vendors who can choose their customers. They might say, you only buy from us if you buy more than a certain amount, or we know you. The power shifts from the customer to the vendor. The logic of the supply chain, rather than consumer demand, begins to dominate. This mimics digital markets where increasingly it is the customer being rated along with the seller. For Uber and Airbnb, you have to show you are a worthy customer of their brand. The market is not one of free choice but one where the customer has to demonstrate that they are a good citizen and a good consumer, which increasingly mean the same thing.
What Is Happening to the Cryptomarkets
Even well coordinated cross-jurisdictional law enforcement operations such as ‘Onymous’ covering multiple agencies and markets have at best short term impact (Soska and Christin 2015). The effect of law enforcement interventions is subject to rapid decay. It is a combination of: highly motivated participants, quasi-trust relationships and mechanisms, extensive weak social network ties and a well maintained underlying infrastructure. At one point it appeared that cryptomarkets were highly resilient in part due to their reproduction of similar factors as the rest of the illicit drug market—a distributed organisational structure and low barriers to entry at even high levels (Reuter and Haaga 1989).
In 2019 the main markets started to go offline. Dreammarket was closed by its administrators. Wall Street was subject to an exit scam, then an administrator began blackmailing users before posting login information on a popular discussion site, before finally being seized by law enforcement. Wallstreet market was seized after an exit scam, following which one of the site moderators, Med3l1n tried to blackmail users and ended up posting his access information to the site’s server on Dread, a discussion forum. The ecosystem is starting to eat itself. Law enforcement is also becoming more adept at cutting out the supporting limbs of the ecosystem, where information is shared about cryptomarkets.
Another development is that markets are seeking new darknets as Tor does not protect them well against DDoS attacks. One market, Libertas, was the first to set up on the i2p darknet for that reason. This may be a last throw of the dice, or presage a larger shift away from Tor.
This All Matters Because as a Society We Are Far More Constrained Than at Any Time in the Past
The great squatters movements of the post-Second World War era, the social movements of the Deep South, the anti-colonial movements all relied on what was annoying not being illegal: they went on being annoying until they got what they wanted. It was recognised that being a responsible citizen and breaking the law could be quite compatible, indeed necessary. Squatters just wanted a home. Those gaps have been slammed shut. Our public forums are private. Our movements are monitored and any step out of line is criminalised.
There are some spaces where communities can form around their own rules and with minimal platform effects. Psychedelic IRC discussions, darknet groupings, discord servers and other corners of the internet allow for communities to form without having to worry too much about the constraints of Big Tech. These spaces matter if digital life is going to be anything other than centralised and algorithmically governed.
It also matters because we live in a world where states and corporations operate strategic lawlessness. There are much softer lines between ‘state’ ‘criminal networks’ and politics. Society is becoming more digitally criminal in that sense, of crime being strategically employed as a part of the working of power. Crime therefore stops living in the dark spaces, and occupies the grey spaces—where bitcoin codes can be used to pass along child pornography, where rating systems can be fixed to deliver monetised likes, and where dating apps can be used to deal illicit drugs.
Communities are generally successful when they are communities of shared practice, where members agree on grounds rules of interaction, safety, and where they are not over reliant on the technology. A simple infrastructure can be more resilient than an opaque one. Digital has effects beyond the commission of crime. In some cases it generates community or emerges from new communities, it prioritises trust and resilience, is disorganised but monopolistic, and is information and expertise creating
Conclusion
Illegal markets are not just about the stuff they provide. In the favelas of Rio, drug trafficking is resilient, politically connected criminal activity (Arias 2009). In the Rio favela Santa Ana, traffickers deliver services to Santa Ana residents. They are able to gain legitimacy because violence comes both from police and drug gangs, and state violence is the more dangerous. Residents are not faced with the choice between peace and violence but between two sources of violence, one of which appears far more arbitrary. Those who live in the grey zone much make choices like that. A combination of politics and power shapes the drug economy. In the digital crime economy, we have seen themes of structural violence; contested political authority; state failure; justice; marginalisation; and the connection between the drug trade and globalisation. Criminal networks are structured and located various by territory, or by the social strata they can occupy and claim. Illegal networks are destructive and constructive, spreading norms and technology, creating communities and also intensifying harm. They are more and more tied into the technically embedded logics of modern informational capitalism and the nation-state focused power structures of the fractured internets.